... is an internet computer museum relic ;o

The Victor 9000 / Sirius S1 was conceived by Chuck Peddle who also designed the first Commodore PETs. This machine was quite innovative and superior in many points to the original IBM PC. It met a certain success in Europe as the IBM PC was not yet available there, whereas the Sirius S1 (european name of the Victor 9000) was. ACT sold a lot of these systems in UK, and their first “homemade” computer, the Apricot PC, borrowed a lot to the Sirius S1.

The mechanical keyboard is very complete and has its own 8035 cpu. The 12’’ monochrome monitor is equiped with an anti-relflection filter and can be adjusted horizontaly and verticaly. Contrast and luminosity are controlled directly from the keyboard. The computer can display text ranging from 80 x 25 to 132 x 50. But the best feature is the high resolution reaching 800 x 400 pixels!

The Victor 9000 is equiped with a Codec which can sample and replay sounds in telephone quality. There are two V24 / RS232 ports and one parallel connector which can also be used as an IEEE-488 interface (to connect measurement instruments for example). There is also an optional light-pen, which is in fact a touch pen using resistive mesh on the CRT.

The two 5.25” disk-drives are single-sided and offer 600 kb each. But double-sided models were available as an option and offered 1.2 Mb each.
The Victor 9000 was perhaps best known for how it was able to achieve such high density on it’s floppy disks. It used variable speed disk drives; there were 9 different speeds used. As the drive head moved outward the speed would increase. It was really neat to hear the speed change as the drive head moved.

The Victor 9000 could run with MS-DOS or CP/M 86. Many languages were available: Basic 86, C-Basic, Cobol, CIS-Cobol, Pascal, Fortran, PL1, PLM, etc.; as well as some software: Wordstar, Spellstar, Mailmerge, Multiplan, etc.

welp, i’m slowly but steadily moving the site over to the new layout.  it occurred to me that i’d been arin721 for so long… i really should work that 721 into any graphics for the site.  so.  i did.  fits me.  i like it.  :D i may just be babbling to myself here, but by golly, i should have something i like to look at while doing so

there will be sections that are still using the old design, bear with me til i’m done, they should be updated soon.

to any chat friends who might stumble in here every now and again (and you know who you are), been fun chatting with you.  i’m taking an ~a-p~ break.  there’s been enough drama in my life, i don’t need more.  people baiting and trolling to elicit responses in some mean-spirited game.  nanny network monitoring everyone’s speech.  pfft.  chat is supposed to be fun.  not work.  ...so ~they~ can win.  let ‘em.  i’ve so many other things on my mind, a bit less chat won’t hurt me. 

first, fox news reported on ”hackers on steroids.

now, npr reports on Anonymous’ Wages Attack on Scientologists.

anonymous’ message to scientology:

~cough~ be there.

the long arm of the law now reaches out to slap a 26 year old who ran the website www.tv-links.co.uk for doing nothing more than ~linking~ to possibly pirated material. 

from the guardian:

A 26-year-old man from Cheltenham was arrested on Thursday in connection with offences relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement on the internet, Fact said.

The arrest and the closure of the site - http://www.tv-links.co.uk - came during an operation by officers from Gloucestershire County Council trading standards in conjunction with investigators from Fact and Gloucestershire Police.

read on...

check out this website.  he has 2 fun little games, click “i am making video games” to play them!